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fdisk /mbr???

F

fow99

Senior member
Hi all,

To my understanding, this command will rewrite the mbr. And it won't touch any partition and data on the hard drive since mbr doesn't belong to any partition. Is this correct? So I can use a DOS/Win98 boot disk to do this on a hard disk which has NTFS, is this true too?
 
IBM's ZAP utility is a convenient way to destroy the MBR as well.

🙂

I dunno about FDISK though, I never have to use the /mbr switch.

Viper GTS
 
Why do you need to destroy the boot record? Installed linux and don't want it anymore? if so just do fdisk /mbr and your system will run fine.
 
You are correct. Your c: partition will remain intact. It only formats the MBR which is not a part of any of the partitions you would use for data.
 
fdisk /mbr won't hurt anything and it does'nt care who made the harddrive.

There are two copies of the mbr on your drive. There is the working copy that is normally accessed and, unfortunately, is subject to infection by various virues and there is a backup copy. When your primary mbr becomes infected or damaged you can use fdisk /mbr to replace it with a copy of the backup mbr. After doing so you will have a clean (hopefully) mbr plus you still have the original backup mbr.

Go for it. It can't hurt.
 
Yes, fdisk /mbr or some such variation is a method I have used on several ocasions to clear the Master Boot Record (MBR) of errors/viruses on a Win98SE machine.

However NTFS formatted drives under a Win98 system? I don't believe there is such an animal.
I have experimented with this in recent months and did a post on this. My experience was that a WinXP system can access NTFS and FAT formatted drives on the same computer. A Win98 computer can access FAT formatted drives on that computer and NTFS drives on a (WinXP) computer on the network, but a Win98 computer could not access an NTFS formatted drive within it's own computer. I hope I stated that clearly enough.
 


<< Yes, fdisk /mbr or some such variation is a method I have used on several ocasions to clear the Master Boot Record (MBR) of errors/viruses.
 >>


But this will make a NT machine unable to boot, right?
 
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